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Commentary & Analysis

In timely and incisive analysis, our experts parse the latest development news and devise practical solutions to new and emerging challenges. Our events convene the top thinkers and doers in global development.

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In celebration of UHC day, the Center for Global Development is pleased to host a short program—Better Decisions, Better Health: Practical Experiences Supporting UHC from around the World—featuring practical experiences supporting UHC from Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and at the global level. A keynote address from Mark McClellan will precede remarks and presentations from the core partners of the International Decision Support Initiative (iDSI).

How can countries get optimum health value for their money? What's a health benefits plan and why do countries need them? How should countries decide what's included in their health coverage and what's not? A new CGD book from Amanda Glassman, Ursula Giedion, and Peter C. Smith answers these questions and more.

This event will serve as an opportunity to discuss and celebrate the launch of a special supplement to the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene that reports on nine new contributions on the impact of malaria control interventions. Specifically, the articles document the success of various malaria control efforts (including the causal link between malaria intervention scale-up and reductions in malaria morbidity and mortality) and new methods for evaluating the impact of large-scale malaria control programs. Taken together, the articles represent a conceptual and practical framework for planning and executing a new generation of impact evaluations, with possible applications to other health conditions in low-resource settings.

The 2014-2015 Ebola epidemic broke out and affected thousands of people at a time when there were no medicines approved to treat or prevent Ebola. Poor infrastructure, capacity gaps, widespread mistrust, and disagreements over the design and ethical nature of any clinical trials complicated efforts to conduct research on investigational drugs and vaccines. In the wake of the outbreak, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine tasked a committee with analyzing the clinical trials carried out during the outbreak and developing recommendations to improve the implementation of such trials in the future. In this session, committee members Gerald Keusch and David Peters will discuss findings from the committee’s recently released report and the kind of governance structures that need to be in place for effective international coordination and collaboration.

At a London conference earlier this month, some donors promised generous funding for family planning services in developing countries. At the same time, however, future support from the US is in doubt, and progress towards the FP2020 family planning goals has been extremely limited. Just how much progress have we made, and how far do we have to go? What difference will the new pledges make, and how should they be used? Rachel Silverman, CGD’s assistant director of global health policy, responds to these questions in this week’s podcast.

The US agricultural sector is critical to global food security, but many of the policies that currently govern it negatively impact people around the world. In a new book, CGD visiting fellow Kim Elliott argues for practical policy reforms in three areas that are particularly damaging to developing countries: food aid, biofuel subsidies, and antibiotic resistance in livestock. As the US Congress works through a major new farm bill, Elliott joins the CGD Podcast to discuss how the US can reform agricultural policy to achieve better outcomes.

Consider this statement: Science knows how to deal with a pandemic outbreak, but policy gets in the way. That was how we framed a recent event at CGD with key people who led the US government’s response to the Ebola outbreak in 2014. Drawing from that event, this podcast brings you some ideas of how to improve the global system of response and increase our preparedness for the next inevitable outbreak. Speakers include Jeremy Konyndyk, Amy Pope, David Smith, Rebecca Martin, and Amanda Glassman.

An infectious disease outbreak anywhere on earth poses a direct threat to Americans. On airplanes, trains, and ships—and via migratory birds or insects that cannot be constrained by borders—pathogens can easily travel around the world, reaching a network of major cities in as little as 36 hours. Keeping Americans safe from the pandemic threat will require U.S. action and leadership both at home and abroad. A diverse panel of experts discusses the scale and scope of pandemic risk; the economic and security rationale for investment in pandemic preparedness; and opportunities to strengthen America’s ability to prevent and respond to the next pandemic.

The headline figure revealed in the "skinny budget" was 28.4 percent cuts to the State Department, USAID, and international programs. When other areas of spending directly relevant to development are considered, the actual level of cuts is over 30 percent. What do these cuts mean for the people most affected and for America’s role as a global development leader? CGD’s Scott Morris and Amanda Glassman weigh in.

The scale of the turnout at the Women’s Marches across the world recently, along with President Trump’s early reinstatement of a ban on US funding for organizations that offer family planning services in foreign countries, seem to suggest an administration already at odds with an entire gender. On this week’s podcast, three CGD senior fellows weigh in on the evidence that engaging and empowering women—both at home and overseas—makes good sense, especially in an America-First strategy.

In 2016 on the CGD Podcast, we have discussed some of development's biggest questions: How do we pay for development? How do we measure the sustainable development goals (SDGs)? What should we do about refugees and migrants? And is there life yet in the notion of globalism? In this edition, we bring you highlights of some of those conversations.

Together with some of the country’s leading experts, we explore how a new partnership between the U.S. Treasury Department and PEPFAR will support finance ministries to strengthen the efficiency and effectiveness of the health sector and the fight to end HIV/AIDS. This interactive discussion addresses several questions: Why this partnership? How can Treasury support the global health and HIV agenda? What challenges do finance ministries currently face in their engagement in the health sector? And how do we ensure that finance ministries are integrated into structures to monitor resources and expenditures in HIV and the health sector more broadly?

CGD founding president Nancy Birdsall has seen a few US presidents come and go in her long career as a leading development economist, but her message to all occupants of the white house has remained fairly steady: Enact smart policies that help developing countries build stable, prosperous economies of their own—and that will help people at home too. This week she joins the CGD podcast to talk about some of those ideas, and why development should be a priority for the next us president.

Almost a year since the adoption of the SDGs in a celebrity-endorsed fanfare, ONE cofounder Jamie Drummond and CGD's Rajesh Mirchandani discuss how the practice of advocacy has changed through time, and what organizations like ONE and CGD can learn from each other.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) threatens future growth and prosperity, as well as health. Without global action, the UK's Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, led by Lord Jim O'Neill, estimates that an additional 10 million people will die every year from drug-resistant infections and the global economy will experience a loss of $100 trillion by 2050. The impact from rising drug resistance will be felt worldwide, hitting low- and middle-income countries hardest.

Since the advent of penicillin in the 1920s, antimicrobial drugs have become the foundation of modern medicine. Yet growing antimicrobial resistance (AMR)—the increasing ability of pathogens to withstand and survive treatment with antimicrobial drugs—threatens to erode and reverse almost a century of health gains. The United Kingdom’s Review on Antimicrobial Resistance suggests that AMR could cause 10 million deaths each year and drain over $100 trillion from the global economy by 2050. Heads of state set precedent at the G20 summit in 2015 by affirming AMR is a serious threat that will require a coordinated international response.

The global health community has made great strides in addressing AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria: fewer people are contracting these diseases, fewer people are dying from them, and far more people are enrolled in life-saving treatments. Yet to sustain this progress and defeat these three diseases, the global community must find more efficient ways to allocate and structure funding.